The Bureaucratized Beast: How Art Mirrors Switzerland’s Wolf Obsession

Few creatures irritate the comfortably orderly Swiss mind quite like the wolf. Between political debates over shooting quotas and rural anxieties, the predator has long ceased to be just an animal; it is an ideological battleground. At the Kunsthaus Zofingen, however, the current exhibition titled The Wolf in Contemporary Art takes a step back from the hysterical rhetoric to examine why this canine continues to haunt the collective psyche.

Upon entering, visitors encounter fifteen life-sized wooden wolves carved with raw chainsaw cuts by Nidwalden sculptor Rochus Lussi. These figures—howling, crouching, playing—force the public into the middle of the pack. Lussi’s work poses a quiet, uncomfortable question about whether modern humans, encased in their safe, highly regulated sanctuaries, are the victims of nature or its ultimate captors.

The exhibition deliberately avoids delivering a lesson in biology. Artistic director Eva Bigler focuses instead on the wolf as a vessel for human contradictions: freedom versus threat, wilderness versus control. This paradox becomes explicit in Chantale Demierre’s installation titled Rollwölfe. By drawing pencil portraits of wolves on forty-six clay targets—matching the exact number of wolves culled in Switzerland in 2024—the artist highlights how quickly wildlife is reduced to target practice in the name of resource management.

Sophie Schmidt takes this obsession with order a step further by physically enlarging sixteen pages of the Swiss Federal Hunting Act into oversized wall displays. Standing before giant sheets of legislative jargon, one realizes that the modern wolf in Switzerland exists less in the forest than in the legal code. Meanwhile, painter Andrea Nyffeler subverts classic folklore with a series of Little Red Riding Hood portraits, stripping away traditional victimhood in favor of a direct, defiant gaze at the spectator.

Rather than offering easy political compromises, the Zofingen showcase exposes a prosperous, risk-averse society grappling with an entity it cannot fully codify or domesticate. It suggests that the fierce domestic debates over predator management say far less about the animal itself than about the human impulse to bureaucratize every last corner of existence.

Written by Andreas Hofer andreas.hofer@alpineweekly.com